Back in St. Petersburg, Igor and I eat an entire Papa John’s pizza together.
He is gushing with impressions and information. More excited than I’ve seen him since the crisis began.
Big Al and his wife, Katya, work around the clock there. He is the chief cook and she is the restaurant manager. They are trying to make up the money Big Al lost on an apartment deal with a crooked real estate agency in St. Petersburg.
One night, Igor went to the beach at two a.m. He befriended a vicious German shepherd and ran with the dog on the beach all night. He would later find out it was named Mukhtar after a dog in a famous classic movie. He called the dog Dillinger, Dilly for short.
African guys in tribal dress posed for photos on the beach with kids. The kids hung on spits, and the Africans pretended they were cooking them. Dilly and Igor slept on the beach one night.
Igor hands me the notebook he kept. There are pages and pages in it of questions he asked the director who interviewed him. He asked about soda mix (she didn’t know what soda mix was) and he asked about Wi-Fi. He had some sketches in there that showed some of his renovation plans. “I want to make modifications a little bit,” he says.
He tells me about the prosecutor he sat with on the train from Sochi back to St. Petersburg. He was divorced and had custody of the kids. He was thirty-three but looked forty-four. “I told him about you,” he says. “I told him about our travels and our lives. He got drunk and said, ‘You are a spy like your American friend.’“
We head over to Piskaryovka and go to the courtyard to have some beers. His friends are there taking turns around the Ping-Pong table.
The courtyard has soccer goals. A statue of a bee and a statue of a bear. A geometric flower garden of marigolds.
His friends from the neighbourhood call me Chev. The English j sound doesn’t exist in Russian. The closest one gets is the awkward consonant cluster made by joining the sounds d and zh for a duh-zh sound, or, more simply, just ch. Also, the courtyard denizens of Piskaryovka are all fans of the series of Crank films whose contract killer protagonist’s name, Chev Chelius, rolls off the tongue.
Igor’s courtyard is like a living example of Ella Polyakova’s diagnosis of Russian society entering the twenty-first century. An entire generation that has given up on hope, on anything except surviving the next crisis, one which they fully expect to come along sooner or later, exists here and in courtyards exactly like it all over Russia.
I am probably the first American ever to set foot in this courtyard, and, as Igor says, I am “a point of interest.”
One very drunk Special Forces guy eyes me across the Ping-Pong table. (“He is with, like, Navy Seals,” Igor says. “But tougher.”) Another asks me, “What kind of mushrooms do you have in the US?” They ask me about the population. They are impressed that I know how many states there are in the States. How many provinces are there in Canada? On this count I am not certain, having forgotten my mnemonic for remembering them all. One guy says for certain there are six. They discuss how many republics are in the CIS and how many republics were in the Soviet Union, and no one knows.
I talk to a guy named Kyrill about cars (he wants a VW Golf), Putin (he hates him), the crisis (it’s going to get worse).
Another common courtyard topic: gas prices. They want to know how much gas costs in North America. They’re incensed that they live in a major oil-producing nation and pay basically the same price as, or more than, we pay in the West.
The Special Forces guy stares at me the whole time. Finally he asks, “Are black people in America like what you see on TV?”
“I think some of them are, yes,” I say.
“Are you a patriot?” Igor’s friend Andrei asks.
“It’s an interesting question,” I say. “I’m not a nationalist and it’s strange for me to say something like I’m proud to be an American, because it suggests that I’m better than someone else who, through accident of birth, was born somewhere else. But I do think the country is an incredible model of democracy, with great highs and shameful lows. I don’t agree with lots of things the government does.”
They nod their heads. “We also don’t agree with many things our government does,” Andrei says, the implication being, I catch, But we still love our country …
“Let’s go,” Igor says.
I wonder what deductions they’re making about me/us from my drunken blather. Do I confirm for them that Americans love their country, or don’t love it and move to Canada then hang out in Russia? Or do I confirm for them that “we” are like “them,” or not? In A Russian Journal, Steinbeck always had just the right thing to say about his delegation. I’m not the person for the job.
The Special Forces guy across from me growls, in stilted English: “I fucking hate all Americans.” He looks me dead in the eye.
“Okay, see you, guys,” Igor says, pulling me up from the bench by my shoulders.
Igor and I take the same path he took fifteen years ago to meet his friends at school and celebrate his last day.
We pass the playground where he spent his childhood. Like countless other playgrounds in countless other St. Petersburg courtyards, the swing sets, once bright blue and red and yellow, are rusted and faded. “Things are not changing here,” he says. “New people aren’t coming. It’s the same.” This is his place. This is home.
We pass the technical college, where there is a brick wall designed so that alternating bricks extrude. One of the favourite activities of Igor and his friends when they were boys was scaling this wall. “All the way to the top,” he says, pointing to the roof of the two-storey building.
We dodge some sketchy-looking stray dogs laid out on the tracks.
We cross the railway tracks where the regional passenger trains run and where the freight trains bring coal into the city along the path of the only supply line during the siege.
We hop a fence and a platform. We cross the tracks. We squeeze through some bars with barbed wire wrapped around the top of them.
Then we are at his old school, a four-storey white brick building, Gymnasium 192, Bryusovskaya School, named for the Symbolist poet Bryusov.
The yard used to be just a playground, but now there is a quite modern set-up: a rubber track circling a mini soccer field with goals and high nets to catch stray shots. A group of guys are playing soccer on the turf. Some of them are good. There are pull-up bars under which a group of teenagers are drinking beer, and a basketball court.
We sit in the bleachers and watch the games. He points to the ninth floor of the building opposite the school. “In winter, my friend had the apartment there on the ninth floor, and we would make the biggest snowballs we could and go up there and drop them out the window.”
Igor arranges for Anya to drive us over to my apartment at Bolshevikov. It’s the only way she could get him to agree to see her before he left.
While we wait, I try to explain why I answered the aggressive guy’s question about my being a patriot the way I did. “On one hand, I thought okay, this guy loves Russia, so there are two ways this can go. I can say, ‘I love America,’ and then he will respect me for loving my country, or I could say, ‘I love America,’ and then he could lower his eyes at me and say, ‘I hate all Americans.’ Or I could say, ‘No, I’m not a patriot.’ And he would say, ‘This is what’s wrong with America, they don’t love their country.’“
“Actually, you can say everything. He was drunk. But in this case, I can explain you one thing. He can say everything, but he will never touch you. And if even with the word, because I am standing nearby you.”
“I knew he wouldn’t touch me. Well, I hoped that he wouldn’t touch me.”
“You just needed to say honestly, that is all. It’s all he wanted.”
“But it’s just an accident I’m there. One Portuguese just happened to move there and that Portuguese’s offspring happened to meet a German after World War II and they moved there as well, and so on, and then me. And now I live in Canada.”
“Man. I want just to say you one thing. Enjoy being there, ‘cause here it’s another story. It’s just opposite as I told you before. Here, we are living on our own rules. And you will never understand it.” Then he adds: “My friends in the courtyard, they didn’t like USA before they met you. Now they say it’s okay.”
Anya pulls up in her dad’s SUV and we get in. The CD player is suspiciously cued to play Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.”
Anya has a few things in the car that she’s returning to Igor. One of them is a briefcase that Big Al had given him and that he’d left, at some point, at her place. Anya gives him her own gift, a coffee press that she stole from the Atrium. Their whole exchange is awkward and silent.
Anya drops us off at my place on Bolshevikov. She and Igor formally and politely say goodbye. They hug briefly. I walk away to give them a moment.
When Igor catches up with me, he reports that Tanya from Irkutsk is texting him again. “She’s living separately with husband,” he says excitedly.
Igor and I go to the Glory Pub. They play Charlie Chaplin videos on their wide screen, then DVDs of live concerts, first Phil Collins and Genesis and finally, at our request, Metallica.
“Man,” he says. “I don’t want to leave this city, just realized it.”
Everything falls apart in the run-up to his departure. A few days before Igor is due to leave, we had planned on mushroom hunting. The boots were parked by the door. Plastic bags crammed into them. Backpack stocked with beer and water and bread and pickles.
But we miss the first train. On a Saturday in Petersburg, if you don’t catch the first train, the forests are picked clean of mushrooms.
So I sit at his apartment for a while. For breakfast we have a bowl of hot borscht, some juice from a jar of pickled tomatoes, and garlic lavash.
On the counter at his apartment are three jars of freshly pickled sorrel. “Mom is doing for wintertime. From it comes very tasty soup.”
The kombucha colony is still sitting on the table with cheesecloth rubber-banded across the top. The mushroom, or whatever it is, has waterlogged, flattened out across the surface of the water.
The day before he leaves, we planned to go to the round banya one last time. But he answers the door dressed in full-body grey thermal underwear. His eyes are yellow and bloodshot. He has chills and a fever.
“Sorry, man,” he says. “I can’t go to banya in this condition.”
“Swine flu,” I say.
We sit at his kitchen table, which is now filled with jars of new things pickling and fermenting. We eat fish and chicken, and he eats soup with liver and chicken hearts.
He has a forty-two-hour train ride beginning tomorrow.
We sit around watching TV. A report is on about Medvedev clamping down on corruption. He tells me that V Kontakte was hacked and nothing is working, even his beloved mafia role-playing games.
“I have eleven million euro, and I don’t know what to do with it,” he says.
The next day, I go to meet Igor at the train station to see him off. I buy him two new books and a Fusion five-blade razor as going-away gifts.
His mom is there, all made up. He is standing with his new seventeen-inch laptop in a new laptop case.
Mom is nervous, on the verge of tears again. She tells him that he dressed all wrong because it’s going to be hot and to remember to call her as soon as he gets there and to be careful and did he forget anything and she will miss him.
“I kissed the cats,” he says. “Little fuckers … Well, there I have Dilly and there are a lot of cats. I will rent one.”
He tells me to come visit him there. If he doesn’t like it, he’ll return when the initial three-month contract is up. If he does like it, I’ll have a place to stay for the Olympics in 2014.
The train starts to pull away. He kisses his mom. Then she and I walk along with his coupe. He opens the window and reaches his hand out and we shake through the window of the moving train. The St. Pete to Sochi picks up speed and disappears from sight.